Hunter

With it’s sterling academic reputation, Hunter College High School on the Upper East Side ranks annually as one of the country’s top high schools, excelling in such brainiac extracurriculars as chess, debating and science competitions.
This year the school has game.
Its basketball team, undefeated at 15-0 after a 68-43 victory Monday at Norman Thomas High School, leads its public schools division, and the Hawks are ranked among the best city teams.
And this year, the team has a Jewish taam (flavor).

The ongoing hunt for Nazi war criminals made news last week when evidence emerged that Aribert Heim, the wartime “Dr. Death” in Mauthausen who conducted experiments on prisoners, was given haven in Egypt and presumably died there. Efraim Zuroff has been searching for information about Heim throughout his two decades as director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office.

What’s one of the world’s greatest rock stars doing at a Jewish benefit dinner? The answer came Monday night when Bono, the voice and wordsmith driving the fabulously popular band U2, became the first rock and roll personality to receive the Humanitarian Laureate Award from the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Bono, a 43-year-old native of Dublin, was honored for his international campaign to raise public awareness of the AIDS epidemic killing millions in Africa and forgive the crushing monetary debt of poverty-stricken Third World countries.

The latest skirmish in the halls of Jewish academia has, surprisingly, nothing to do with Israel. But the new discord over academic grants made by the Posen Foundation concerns a charged topic just the same — the growing trend of teaching about Jewish culture through an exclusively secular lens.

The ongoing hunt for Nazi war criminals made news last week when evidence emerged that Aribert Heim, the wartime “Dr. Death” in Mauthausen who conducted experiments on prisoners, was given haven in Egypt and presumably died there. Efraim Zuroff has been searching for information about Heim throughout his two decades as director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office.

With it’s sterling academic reputation, Hunter College High School on the Upper East Side ranks annually as one of the country’s top high schools, excelling in such brainiac extracurriculars as chess, debating and science competitions.
This year the school has game.
Its basketball team, undefeated at 15-0 after a 68-43 victory Monday at Norman Thomas High School, leads its public schools division, and the Hawks are ranked among the best city teams.

The weekly e-mail messages that Temple Shaaray Tefila on the Upper East Side sends to its members usually concern such congregational news as worship services and adult education classes.
This week, the news was about a member’s visit to Beijing — Sandy Fong finished 21st in the Summer Olympics 50-meter rifle shooting event.
Fong, 18, who returned home this week to begin her freshman year as a pre-med student at Princeton University, competed in the Games for the first time, six years after she began learning the sport.

A man who likes extinct languages, Mel Gibson had a chance to practice his Latin this summer — he made several mea culpas.
Following his drunken, sexist, profane, anti-Semitic tirade in Malibu in July, the actor-director apologized to the police officers who arrested him. He apologized in a general public statement for saying “despicable” things. He apologized “specifically to everyone in the Jewish community,” to “those who have been hurt and offended by those words.”

Sixty-five years ago, France tried to show its loyalty to the Nazis.
Last week, France showed its loyalty to history.On the anniversary of the July 1942 deportation of some 13,000 Jews by Vichy police from a bicycle stadium that served as a transit camp, French officials took part in a series of memorial events.

Henreich Heine, the German-Jewish poet, wrote more than a century ago, ìder vorhang fallt, das stuck ist aus,î the curtain falls, the play is done. Then, in that tragic coda, the ax fell, too. Yet the drama goes on, a few German-Jews puttering around on a stage they refuse to leave, enchanted by that language.ìWir haben viel fur einander gefuhlt,î how deeply we were wrapped in each otherís lives, wrote Heine.